Reforming the NSIP regime: Balancing speed and quality in infrastructure development
by Andy Gregory
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Reforming the NSIP regime: Balancing speed and quality in infrastructure development
- Post Date
- 07 May 2025
- Read Time
- 5 minutes
On 23rd April 2025, Matthew Pennycook, Minister of State for Housing and Planning, announced plans to reform the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) regime.[1] The statement indicates that the upcoming Planning and Infrastructure Bill will be amended to remove the requirements for:
(a) statutory consultation as part of the DCO pre-application, and
(b) the provision of Preliminary Environmental Information (PEI) (often provided in a PEI Report or PEIR).
Challenges and benefits of consultation
There is no doubt that undertaking consultation with regulators and the public can be challenging. When done well, it can garner local community support and provide valuable evidence of collaborative working which is considered favourably through the examination phase. If poorly executed, it can jeopardise a project as opponents often target the consultation process to derail it or to seek judicial review.
Despite its clear benefits, the Statutory Consultation process could be restrictive to developers. Late changes to designs after completion of Statutory Consultation would often require further statutory consultation to agree and clarify proposed changes. It is here where clear savings in time will be possible with the likely adoption of more flexible and pragmatic approaches to engagement.
It is encouraging that the need for early engagement and consultation will remain. The need for front loading consultation and high-quality applications is made quite clear for applications to be accepted into examination. Applicants will be guided by the introduction of new statutory guidance. With new guidance in place, it is hoped that there will be a more flexible, pragmatic, and project specific approach to consultation, rather than the somewhat restrictive nature of the current Statutory Consultation requirements.
Applicants and consultees should welcome and recognise the benefits of a less restrictive process and whilst some time and cost savings may be made, this new approach is unlikely to result in a reduction in the level of overall engagement needed to shape a project and prepare it for examination.
What is likely to change is the form which that consultation takes. It is likely that consultation will be far more targeted, allowing consultees and communities to concentrate on the elements of an application that are relevant to them, rather than the ‘everyone reviews everything’ approach that has emerged over recent years. The proposed approach should also free up organisations to concentrate on the key issues and the results should be better outcomes for projects overall.
Finally, the acid test will be made at the acceptance stage of the application.It is clear that the Secretary of State wishes to see high-quality applications for examination placing even more importance on documents like Adequacy of Consultation Milestone (AoCM) and Statements of Common Ground (SOCG). The Secretary of State wants to avoid dealing with issues that could have been resolved through consultation prior to examination. This is a strong message; consultation prior to submitting an application will remain a vital part of the process.
Benefits of the Preliminary Environmental Information (PEI)
Since its inception, the PEI Report (PEIR) has been a tool for demonstrating to the public and relevant bodies what a project entails and highlighting its potential impacts at a stage when feedback can be incorporated into the final submission. The feedback on elements of the PEIR and a project design provides invaluable local insights for project developers, which might otherwise be overlooked.
It is not clear yet whether the statutory guidance will require some form of PEI, but developers would be well advised to plan for providing PEI to consultees and local communities to keep them informed of potential environment impacts and benefits of projects. With a more flexible approach, it should be possible to target the content of PEI to different audiences rather than providing the one size fits all approach currently used. Such an approach would benefit the developer, consultees, and local communities alike.
Aims and potential outcomes of the reform
The stated aim of the reform is to boost economic growth by ‘fast-tracking’ 150 major infrastructure projects before the end of this Parliament. The proposed changes are intended to reduce delays and minimise the need for repeated rounds of statutory consultation. However, to genuinely accelerate the consultation process, investment in the capacity and efficiency of statutory bodies is essential. Perhaps this is the underlying goal of the reform: to enable statutory consultees to concentrate on the most critical aspects of a project, thereby achieving more with less. By equipping these organisations with clear guidance and adequate support, the consultation process can become more focused and less hindered by procedural bureaucracy.
Conclusion
In summary, the need for front loading consultation through pre-application will remain and the changes are unlikely to result in the time savings that are being claimed by some. However, the reforms do provide an opportunity to raise standards of consultation, by moving away from the current restrictive statutory approach to a more flexible and focused approach. This will undoubtedly give developers more freedoms to make better choices and those being consulted with more targeted and relevant information. The outcomes should be better designed projects and higher quality applications.
The outcome of these reforms will become clearer when the Planning Inspectorate issues a consultation on the statutory guidance in the summer, and once the first projects to follow this new regime have passed through the process. There is cautious optimism that these reforms will encourage new approaches to consultation where there is more flexibility for developers to decide how and when to consult, with the results being better designed projects and higher quality applications.
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